How After 150 Years Los Angeles Came to be the Chinese Food Capital of the United States (But Really a History of Chinese Food in the United States and My Personal Journey)

Presentation to the U.S. China People's Friendship Association (2024 Update)

Throughout my life I have worn many hats.  Besides being an attorney and CPA, I can call myself a historical writer, real estate professional and a Chinese American who personally witnessed periods of overt discrimination, subtle discrimination, near acceptance and hate, as well as the end of the immigration laws that prevented most Chinese from migrating to the United States for over 80 years.   It is really all of these guises combined that have enabled me to discern and chronicle the story of Chinese food in the United States.  The discussion of the best Chinese food in the United States doesn't stop at what dishes are served at which restaurants, and what the best dishes are. Rather, it involves the totality of the history and experience of Chinese people in America.

My working career took me all over the United States, to just about every Chinatown and Chinese community, giving me an unparalleled opportunity to eat at Chinese restaurants all over America, enabling me to eat at over 8,000 different Chinese restaurants.  For most of this time I ate in anonymity, but a decade ago a food writer, Clarissa Wei, discovered my story and wrote an article about my dining adventures and my accompanying spreadsheet listing everywhere I had eaten, that went viral around the world.  After reading this, people assumed I was a great connoisseur and expert on Chinese food, which led numerous opportunities to write and opine about Chinese food.   But in fact, I was actually a most improbable person to become someone who would be viewed as an authority on Chinese food in America.   Indeed, there were people who I knew way back when, and upon hearing of my current connection with Chinese food reacted “David R. Chan?  Writing about Chinese food?”  Preposterous!

 

You see growing up as a kid in Los Angeles in the 50s and 60s I hated Chinese food and ate very little Chinese food.  My parents took me to Chinese banquets and I would only eat soy sauce and rice.  To this day I am unable to use chopsticks, thanks to a problem with my hand.  

But let me explain that my childhood experiences with regard to Chinese food weren’t quite as odd as they may strike you.  That’s because back then, Chinese Americans were a negligible portion of the population in Los Angeles, and like many of my contemporaries I was highly Americanized with few Chinese friends.  We ate little Chinese food at home and my mom did not have a wok.  And virtually all of my relatives, my cousins, aunts and uncles were like myself, American born and Americanized. And my parents were American born and their Chinese friends were American born, too. We didn’t speak Chinese at home, partly because my parents' primary language was English, but also they were afraid that if I learned to speak Chinese, my English might be less than perfect.  And they knew that any excuse could be used to discriminate against you if you were Chinese, including not speaking unaccented English.  When I was a boy we didn’t even celebrate Chinese New Year.   Indeed, at this point in time, American born Chinese actually outnumbered those born in China, as those born in China died off or returned to China, with few new immigrants due to the Chinese Exclusion Laws.   And for my age demographic, we were nearly 100% American Born Chinese (ABC's), which the late 1960s first arrivals of post-immigration repeal migrants from places like Hong Kong and Taiwan caused the new kids in town to be tagged as "FOBs" by some of my ABC contemporaries.

 

This is not to say that we American born Chinese fit right in with the greater community.  As I will recount shortly, far from it.   It’s just that there were so few of us that we Chinese-Americans were more of an oddity than anything.  As late as 1970, when I took my first outside job, after a few weeks of working together, while talking to one of my fellow employees I made a passing reference to my Chinese background.  He immediately exclaimed “You’re Chinese?  I thought you were Mexican.”  Stunned, I asked why he thought I was Mexican.  His response was telling, born and raised in Los Angeles, he said I was the first Chinese person he had ever met in his life.   Years later when I recounted this story to my wife, she said she too had been mistaken in the older days as being Mexican.

 

While my topic today indeed is about how Chinese food in Los Angeles has developed into the best in the United States, the story of how we got there involves the broader topics of the history of Chinese people in America, the history of Chinese food in America, and at times are best demonstrated by my personal familial history.   We will learn that these seemingly collateral topics are in fact the heart of what the status of Chinese food is today and why the food is indeed better here in Los Angeles than in San Francisco, New York, or any other place in the rest of the country.   And with regard to these topics, I am at least slightly qualified to speak here today, being one of the founding members of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California back in 1975.  For about a decade I represented the Society as speaker at many events, including being the keynote speaker at the first Asian Pacific American Heritage week ever held in Los Angeles Chinatown, and writing a number of articles on Chinese American history back in the 1970s and 1980s.    

 

After curtailing such historical endeavors for almost 30 years due to career and family responsibilities, I was dragged into the limelight in the Internet age as the man who has eaten at over 8,000 different Chinese restaurants, and here I am.

I presume most of you either remember or heard about mid-20th century Chinese food in America which still exists in parts of America today. It has been said THAT food was one giant joke foisted on the American public for over a century, because Chinese-American food was something unrecognizable to more than 99.9 percent of the people living in China.  Because what was passed off as Chinese food in America was a historical accident molded by Chinese immigration patterns, US immigration laws and demographic factors which I will describe in the rest of this presentation.

Everybody knows that Chinese came to America in the mid-19th century during the California gold rush.  What few people realize is that these Chinese fortune seekers did not come from all over China.  Rather they came primarily from seven rural districts in Toisan county, 60 miles outside of the city formerly known as Canton in southern China.  I was in San Francisco Chinatown recently and I cringed when I saw a new restaurant there called Beijing 49er, because there were no Beijingers in the gold fields, and for that matter, no Beijinger ever played for the San Francisco 49er pro football team.   

 

There are three reasons for this narrowly concentrated migration from China to the California gold fields.  First of all, economic and social conditions in rural south China were the worst, absolutely intolerable, with famine and civil unrest, and people more were desperate to do something radical like migrate abroad.  Secondly, Canton was an international seaport, providing the Toisanese the means to go to America not available to other Chinese.  And lastly, while it was illegal to immigrate from China, that restriction was effectively unenforceable in Canton, being so far away from China’s capital in the city formerly known as Peking.

So for three decades, from the 1850s to the 1880s rural Cantonese from Toisan county and nearby rural areas immigrated in large numbers to America in search of a better economic life, building the railroads and developing California’s natural resources.  It was said that in many Toisanese villages, every adult male was in California.  But because these migrants were mostly adult males who were almost all in the workforce, their seeming presence in California far exceeded their actual numbers.  And as their numbers grew, resentment grew against the Chinese, especially among European immigrant workers, led by the Workingmen's Party and its first-generation Irish immigrant corps leading the charge with their signature slogan, “The Chinese Must Go.”  This culminated in 1882 when the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Law, which until its repeal in 1943 prohibited most residents of China, as well as  Chinese residents of other countries from migrating to the United States.   

 

Now the Chinese Exclusion act did not completely shut off immigration to the United States from China.  There were a small number of exemptions, including for merchants, students, diplomats and clergy.  In addition, US born Chinese were US citizens, and most importantly their foreign-born children themselves were American citizens who were correspondingly not subject to the Chinese Exclusion Laws.  In actuality, much if not most of this continued exclusion era immigration was illegal, in that the new migrants did not actually qualify for the exemptions but were imposters.  This created a system that produced such terms as “paper sons,” “coaching papers” and “slot racket” into America’s Chinatowns, where people tried to prove something that they weren’t, while people who were legally entitled to enter the United States, including American born Chinese returning from a visit to China, might not be able to prove their real identity.   (For more on this topic see my article written for the 1976 American Bicentennial celebration, "The Tragedy and Trauma of the Chinese Exclusion Laws.")

In any event, virtually all of the migrants of the era, both legal and illegal, involved family and friends of Chinese already in the United States.  The product of this is that for a century, nearly the entirety of the Chinese community in the United States consisted of rural Toisanese migrants and their progeny.   The importance of this fact cannot be overemphasized, best demonstrated by this reverse analogy.  It would be as if, say, all the Americans resident in China came from the rural hills of West Virginia.

With this background it’s easy to see where the joke lies.  Chop suey, sweet and sour pork, egg drop soup, moo goo gai pan and egg foo yung were not the national dishes of China, but rather dishes that may have had some roots in rural Toisan (a region whose current population of 1 million is dwarfed by China's total population of 1.4 billion), but were adapted for the local ingredients found in the United States, and ultimately to suit the tastes of the American public which started dining at Chinese restaurants around the turn of the 20^th century.   And while all stripes of Chinese food are now found in the United States, the old distorted few of Chinese food lives on with many Americans even now.

Now let’s see how my personal story fits into this framework.  My paternal grandfather came to the US in 1880 from Toisan, and settled in San Francisco prior to the enactment of the Chinese exclusion laws.  He brought his concubine into this country in the early 1900s, in violation of the Chinese exclusion laws since only his wife could legally enter the US. Around 1915 they moved to Los Angeles. My maternal grandfather immigrated as a paper son from Toisan to Los Angeles around 1915 and brought his wife to Los Angeles around 1920.  All of which makes me the grandson of three illegal aliens. 

When I was born in Los Angeles, the local Chinese population was 5,000, almost entirely all of Toisanese background.  Given that the population of Los Angeles was 2 million, that meant only one out of every 400 Angelinos was Chinese.  Today there are roughly 600,000 Chinese in Los Angeles, very few of whom are Toisanese.  As I mentioned, as a little boy I didn’t eat much Chinese food, but I had a good excuse because the Chinese food of the day wasn’t particularly good.  This issue was exacerbated by the fact that Los Angeles was a minor Chinese community, so many of the better dishes never made it down from the big dog of San Francisco.  Indeed, the Toisanese name for San Francisco was literally “big city.”   (And to show LA’s spot in the pecking order, in Toisanese the term “second city” was reserved for Sacramento, not Los Angeles.  The Toisanese word for Los Angeles was simply “Losang”.)  Compare the 5,000 Chinese Angelinos when I was born to San Francisco’s Chinese population back then of about 75,000 (though the exact number is not known to the sizable number of illegal aliens in the community who didn’t want to be counted in the census).   

So how did we go from the point where Chinese food in America was this bastardized mutation that I refused to eat to today’s Chinese food scene which fully represents the wonderful varieties of regional cuisines in China that we have today?   Well not surprisingly, again it all goes back to the immigration laws.  As I indicated, Chinese Exclusion was repealed in 1943 as a courtesy to our wartime ally China.   But the US operated on a national origins immigration quota system where each country’s quota was based on the proportion of their population presently in the country.  Since there were very few Chinese living in the US, the Chinese were given a whopping annual quota of 105 immigrants.  So, the 1943 repeal was symbolic, not real and did little to change the face of the Chinese community in the US.  Rather we must forward to the late 1960s, where the national origins quota system was abandoned for a system that gave the same quota to all countries in legislation enacted in 1965.  Suddenly, just as many Chinese immigrants could enter the US under quota as could immigrants from Great Britain. 

Since the US and Mainland China were not on speaking terms at the time, the entire Chinese immigration quota under the new system was originally filled by migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the effect on Chinese food in America was immediate.  Cantonese speaking immigrants from Hong Kong piled into and rejuvenated America’s Cantonese Chinatowns, bringing a new, different, and delicious form of Cantonese cuisine supplanting the oldtime rural Toisanese-Cantonese dishes that I turned my back on. The urban flavors of Hong Kong were a welcome and stark change from the existing peasant cuisine.  Then in the later 1970s, Hong Kong evolved into an international dining center, and Cantonese food in the United States got that much better.

 

Los Angeles Chinatown was especially transformed by this Hong Kong migration.  Because LA’s original Chinatown was torn down in the early 1930s to make way for the Union Station, Los Angeles became for decades a city without a true traditional Chinatown. Yes, there was a replacement New Chinatown built on North Broadway, but was not a real, complete community because while there were Chinese restaurants, gift shops and wishing wells, it was largely devoid of Chinese residents, since there was essentially no housing provided for in the New Chinatown.  Rather Chinese residents largely settled south of downtown in neighborhoods next to, or adjunct to the Chinese founded City Market Produce terminal, making the City Market the real, but unsung Chinatown of Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1960s, a Chinatown that few people in Los Angeles knew existed.  This lack of Chinese actually living in New Chinatown effectively made it an ethnic theme park where the cast members went home somewhere else after dark.   Indeed, I have very few childhood remembrances of visiting New Chinatown in the 1950s and 60s.  But when the new Hong Kong immigrants arrived, they actually moved into New Chinatown area, turning an ethnic tourist trap into a true Chinese American community.  

 

Meanwhile, Mandarin speaking Taiwanese migrants did not gravitate to Chinatowns, which were all Cantonese speaking and ended up in alternative locations.  One notable landing point was Manhattan, where Taiwanese chefs opened up dozens, if not hundreds of Chinese restaurants in New York offering newfangled Sichuan and Hunan regional cuisines, never seen before on these shores.  But this was a faux Sichuan and faux Hunan cuisine as these Taiwanese chefs had themselves fled from Mainland China two decades previously, removing the cuisine once from the original source, both in time and space.  Plus these chefs had done their cooking for the military elites of Taiwan, rather than familiar homestyle food, obviously more elevated than the cuisines as a whole.

 

Then these Taiwanese chefs opened up their restaurants in New York, which had no residents from Hunan or Sichuan, making their primary target clientele native New Yorkers.  In adapting their dishes to American tastes, this created a second degree of separation from real Hunan and Sichuan food.  Upper Manhattan went into a frenzy over the new high end Hunan dishes with ingredients and recipes which nobody in New York had known existed.  Meanwhile middle America was swept by faux Hunan and Sichuan cuisine dishes such as hot and sour soup, sizzling rice soup, General Tso’s chicken, mushu pork and kung pao chicken, now added to the pantheon of Chinese American dishes.

Returning to my personal history, at the same time the changes in immigration laws were taking effect, I was attending UCLA, when the school offered its first ever class on Asian American studies (tellingly titled “Orientals in America”), reflecting the ethnic awareness and ethnic studies movement that was born in the late 1960s.   Immediately I was captivated by the topic of the experience of Chinese people in the United States and the fact that Chinese people in America had their own history.  As things turned out, this was one of the triggers to my lifetime study of Chinese food in the United States.  But there were a couple of other intervening factors leading me down the Chinese food path.   When I entered the work force, I made the acquaintance of friends at work who were originally from Hong Kong who showed a passion for food that I had never encountered before.   My Hong Kong friends had been the vanguard of the late 1960s immigration of Chinese from Hong Kong to the United States and they showed me where to go to find this new and exciting brand of Chinese food. This upgrade in Chinese food sparked an interest in me, as this Chinese food was so much better than what I was used to.  And I started to travel around the United States, and made it a point to eat at Chinese restaurants to the extent possible, as part of a greater interest in seeing what Chinese residents and communities were like throughout the United States.   

As the Chinese population in the country began to grow, the number of good, authentic Chinese restaurants began to swell.  As new restaurants kept opening up everyone wanted to be sure that they didn’t miss out on the opening of a new gem, so quite a grapevine developed as to what new Chinese restaurant was hot and what was not.  However, I wanted to see for myself if a new restaurant was worthy or not, so I tried to try to eat at as many of these restaurants as they opened.  Things reached a point in the 1980s when I decided I needed to keep track of the Chinese restaurants I had eaten at in the past and on a going forward basis, essentially to avoid inadvertently eating at the same restaurant twice, marking the beginnings of my Chinese restaurant spreadsheet.  This listing of Chinese restaurants that I have eaten at has been featured in countless articles, programs and presentations, including a column one, front page story in the Los Angeles Times, and a video documentary that has received over a million and a quarter views on the internet.

                                                                      Video linked in text above

 

Even as Los Angeles began to grow as a center of Chinese community and cuisine, San Francisco maintained its edge as new food trends from Hong Kong, such as Chinese seafood restaurants and dim sum palaces spread to the United States.  While the gap between San Francisco and Los Angeles Chinese food clearly narrowed in the 1980s, Angelinos still talked among themselves about heading up to the Bay Area to try the latest Bay Area Chinese restaurant openings. My friends and I would talk about the latest Chinese restaurant openings in San Francisco, when we would travel up north, and what we would eat when we got there.   I remember when my wife and I took a morning flight to San Francisco to eat at the latest phenomenal Chinese restaurant, ate lunch and dinner there, then flew back home that night.

Little did we know that the old order of San Francisco’s culinary dominance that spanned 135 years was about to end.  In the mid to late 1980s, for some reason the conversation among Los Angeles Chinese food lovers turned from talking about finding better Chinese restaurants in San Francisco to finding better Chinese restaurants in Manhattan.  We’d talk about going to New York, what restaurants we would visit, and what dishes we would order.  Of course, we couldn’t fly to New York just for the day like we did with San Francisco, but we did go one an eating trip there once, as did other friends.   I actually have no idea how New York supplanted San Francisco as #1, and New York’s time in first place was relatively brief.  But clearly that marked the end of San Francisco’s reign.

Any jockeying for Chinese food supremacy between San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York quickly became irrelevant due to one major event--the planned takeover of Hong Kong by China in 1997.  Suddenly, anyone in Hong Kong with the means to relocate decided to do so.  And starting in the late 1980s, the primary destination for these Hong Kong expatriates was not San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York.  That destination was Vancouver, BC, as Canada proved to be a less restrictive entry point for Hong Kong migrants, turning Vancouver into the near culinary equivalent of Hong Kong.  Suddenly nobody in the United States talked about visiting anywhere in the US for better Chinese.  All eyes were on Vancouver, when could we plan our next trip to Vancouver, and what restaurants should we try and what dishes we would order.  The differential was so great that whenever I went to Vancouver to eat Chinese food, I literally didn’t bother to eat Chinese food back home in Los Angeles for a month. 

Meeting Martin Yan in Vancouver

Fortunately, not every great Hong Kong chef landed in Vancouver, and quite a few did make their way to San Francisco and Los Angeles raising the bar for local Cantonese food.  A few more of these migrants made their way to LA such that, Los Angeles’ Chinese food inched ahead over both New York and San Francisco in the early-1990s, a lead which Los Angeles hasn’t relinquished since.  However, as noted the ascension of Los Angeles to being the Chinese food capital of the United States really wasn’t that big of a deal, since being the best in the United States was like being the tallest midget in the circus with the crown jewel that was Vancouver just over the border.

On the other hand, despite Vancouver’s food being so much better, unless you lived someplace like Seattle, it’s not like you could go there regularly to eat.  Yes, I wouldn’t eat Chinese food in Los Angeles for a month after returning from Vancouver, but I did eventually start eating here again.  Consequently, the early 1990s were the start of what would be a golden age of Cantonese dining in Los Angeles, with Hong Kong style seafood and dim sum palaces popping up, capped by the 900 seat Ocean Star restaurant in Monterey Park that opened in 1992, and new and improved dishes continually arriving from Hong Kong and Vancouver.   

But even though this golden era for Cantonese food would last a couple of decades, the seeds of its decline had already been planted by new immigration factors.  The US finally re-established diplomatic relations with China in 1979, leading to the first migration of non-Cantonese Chinese to the US from mainland China, as migrants began arriving from the more developed areas such as Shanghai and Beijing.  By the mid to late 1980s, a few Shanghai and Beijing style restaurants started showing up in Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent, San Francisco.   And in the 1990s we saw the appearance of a few real, not faux, Sichuan and Hunan style restaurants.  But it was after the turn of the 21^st century that the appearance of other Chinese regional cuisines accelerated with virtually every Chinese regional cuisine making an appearance in the San Gabriel Valley as natives of these regions arrived.   This arrival of authentic non-Cantonese food in Los Angeles is what has led Los Angeles to become the dominant leader in Chinese food in the US, particularly in the past decade, as the depth and breadth of these regional cuisines in Los Angeles has been unmatched. 

This is probably a good time to stop and reflect what has happened.  Where after a century a half where Chinese food in America was largely synonymous with Cantonese food, Cantonese food in America is now a page two story, except that it was literally a front-page Los Angeles Times story from just before the pandemic, which reported the stunning closing of the San Gabriel Valley’s most iconic Cantonese restaurant, the 900 seat Ocean Star Restaurant, and other similar Cantonese restaurants.  And I vividly remember my last dinner at Ocean Star.  It was a Sunday evening around 6 or 7 pm.  And looking around the dining room there were only four tables occupied.  Indeed, most of the restaurant was sectioned off, and only the front dining room holding perhaps a dozen to fifteen tables was opened.   More recently, another leading dim sum and Cantonese seafood palace, King Hua in Alhambra, fell victim to the pandemic.  The space was vacant for over a year, finally replaced by a branch of a night club and restaurant chain headquartered in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province.

The decline of Cantonese food is vividly demonstrated by a startling statistic.  In examining new restaurant openings in the San Gabriel Valley over the last few years, fewer than 10 percent of these openings are Cantonese.  Not to say Cantonese food is only 10 percent of the market, as Cantonese restaurants are often larger, banquet sized facilities that are less likely to turn over.  But clearly in today’s Chinese communities across America, non-Cantonese food is king, and in this regard, Los Angeles is king, even surpassing Vancouver’s overall lineup of Chinese restaurants.  While Vancouver still has a strong core of Cantonese restaurants, has a lesser core of non-Cantonese regional Chinese cuisines. 

The breadth and depth of non-Cantonese Chinese regional cuisine is Los Angeles is multifaceted.   Here are a few major examples.  Mainland Chinese restaurant chains are pouring into Los Angeles, setting up their first American branches here because this is the place to be.  Initially, the fact that a new restaurant was part of a Mainland China based chain was a novelty, and special notice was made of that fact.  Now, it is so commonplace that such parentage is hardly mentioned.  Meanwhile, Los Angeles pioneers Chengdu Taste and Sichuan Impression in less than a decade have turned Sichuan style food in America on its head with their modern new take on their cuisine, in turn inspiring many Sichuan based restaurant chains to open up branches here and further add to the Sichuanese food revolution.  A food writer who works Hong Kong as well as Los Angeles was stunned to find a Chinese regional restaurant in Los Angeles that did not exist in Hong Kong. 

Now let’s switch gears and introduce a different analysis that also points to why Los Angeles Chinese food is the best.  The answer is in demographics.  While Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York each have roughly identical populations of 600,000 Chinese American residents, only Los Angeles has the San Gabriel Valley.   As recently described by Los Angeles Times food writer Lucas Kwan Peterson in his video on Chinese food in the San Gabriel Valley, in which I make an appearance, the San Gabriel Valley is essentially a 200 square mile Chinatown chock full of every Chinese food imaginable.   

Now how the Chinese community established and grew in the San Gabriel Valley is a very interesting, but little known and surprising story.  In the first half of the 20^th century, Los Angeles was one of the most racially segregated cities in America when it came to housing patterns.  This is not to say that Los Angeles was the most racist city in the country, far from it.  Rather it reflected a peculiar set of circumstances.   Los Angeles exploded in size in the early 20^th century, from 100,000 residents in 1900 to almost 1.3 million by 1930.  This required the construction of vast numbers of new residential neighborhoods in a short time period.

The dark side of this housing boom was that most of these houses contained deed restrictions (called racial restrictive covenants) which limited occupancy of the property to members of the Caucasian race.   Even if a Caucasian owner of a property were willing to sell the property to a minority buyer, ownership of the property would revert to the original owner.   Consequently, if you were Chinese, Japanese, Mexican or African American there were only a limited number of neighborhoods you could live in, primarily those developed before around 1915 when racial restrictive covenants came into vogue all across the country.  If you were Chinese, that means you were  you were most likely confined to areas of south Los Angeles or east Los Angeles.  

Common sample of racial restrictive covenant, like the one in the deed to the first house I purchased back in 1977.  

 

These so called racial restrictive covenants were made ineffective by a 1948 Supreme Court decision, but housing discrimination in Los Angeles continued in some communities for many years.  And let me demonstrate this with one last personal family recollection.  I remember when I was in high school in the early 1960s and we were living in the Crenshaw area, which is one area that did open up to minority residents after the 1948 Supreme Court decision.  My parents were looking to buy a new house in a better part of the area.  After viewing a nice house, we got back in the broker’s car and he took my dad aside and told him not to bother making an offer because all of the residents on the block had signed a pact not to sell their house to any nonwhite.  And even around 1970 when my uncle wanted to buy a house in Palos Verdes, when he asked the real estate broker whether the neighbors might object to a Chinese family moving into the area, the broker didn’t give him a direct answer.  Rather the broker suggested my uncle knock on some doors and ask.  (He bought the house.)  Call it karma, but some of the last bastions of housing segregation in the Los Angeles are now heavily populated by Chinese residents.  Besides Palos Verdes, these would include San Marino, Arcadia, Rowland Heights and South Pasadena.

It was against this backdrop that the San Gabriel Valley Chinatown was born.    Like the Chinese Americans, Japanese American residents of Los Angeles were restricted where they could live, primarily in central and East Los Angeles in housing developed before the advent of deed restrictions.  There was a large settlement of Japanese in East Los Angeles, directly south of the Monterey Park city limit.  In the late 1950s, this neighborhood was condemned for the construction of the Pomona Freeway.  Meanwhile, while these Japanese residents were looking for a new place to move to, new homes were being built on the Monterey Park side of the line.  Monterey Park was a whites-only community, and indeed was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity three decades previously.   Nevertheless, some of these Japanese inquired as to whether they could buy homes in the new tract.  There were no existing neighbors to stop them as had been the case with existing neighborhoods.  And the builders, particularly those of Jewish heritage, said yes, so many Japanese bought new houses there.  Shortly thereafter in the early 1960s, another new housing tract appeared in the hills of northern Monterey Park, not far from a neighborhood in East Los Angeles called El Sereno where many Chinese Americans had settled.   Similarly, many Chinese Americans started moving into the new Monterey Highlands development, and by 1970 there were a couple thousand Chinese Americans, largely engineers and other professionals, living in Monterey Park.

Propitiously, the establishment of this Chinese American beachhead in Monterey Park was soon to collide with the arrival of new Chinese immigrants permitted under the relaxed new American immigration laws.  One of these migrants, an ambitious man named Frederick Hsieh, landed in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.  Shortly thereafter he made his way to Monterey Park where he found a suburban community of hillside homes occupied by many Toisanese Chinese American professionals, and he had a vision.  He went into the real estate business, marketing Monterey Park as the Chinese Beverly Hills to potential Chinese buyers in Taiwan and Hong Kong.   And it worked!  Over the years, the flow of new Chinese residents moved largely eastward, to other communities like San Gabriel, Rosemead, Arcadia, Temple City, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, and many other nearby communities, creating the San Gabriel Valley we know today.

This unique Chinese mega community sets the stage for an unparalleled Chinese dining opportunity in the United States.  There are an incredible number of Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley.  Nobody knows exactly how many, but it could be 800 or a thousand.  This creates a competitive atmosphere for both quality and pricing where marginal players are quickly weeded out.  A few years ago a heralded Chinese restaurant chain set up its first US location in Alhambra and opened to turnaway crowds the week it opened.  I know because I was one of the people turned away. Three months later they were out of business.  So indeed it is only the fittest and best Chinese restaurants that survive.

Other demographic factors add to the quality of the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese restaurants.    In the past decade large numbers of wealthy Mainland Chinese have purchased primary or secondary residences in the San Gabriel Valley, skewing the financial profile of the Los Angeles area Chinese community higher than found in San Francisco and New York.  These wealthy have the dollars and the love of food to demand the highest quality Chinese food they can.  This was aptly demonstrated by the high end pioneer Bistro Na’s restaurant in Temple City, opened only at the end of 2016, yet by 2019 becoming the only Michelin starred Chinese restaurant in the Los Angeles area at the time.  This has been followed just in the past year by the opening of several fine dining Chinese restaurants in several Chinese American communities.

 Bistro Na's

And there’s the presence of a geographically contiguous generation of millennial foodies continually looking for that next great meal that ups the ante.   This so called “626 Generation”, named after the telephone area code encompassing most of the San Gabriel Valley, is a food driven group of young Chinese-American adults in a contiguous location without any equivalent in any other American city like San Francisco or New York. Ironically, the 626ers are unaware of how the Chinese San Gabriel Valley is rooted in the history of housing discrimination in Los Angeles, which I recounted in Lucas Kwan Peterson's Los Angeles Times video noted above.  The most telling response to that video was a comment of thanks from a 626er who said they always thought their family had previously lived in El Sereno because they couldn't afford to live in Monterey Park.   This short comment shows two major misconceptions carried by the 626 Generation--first that there was always a Chinese San Gabriel Valley and secondly that Chinese could always live wherever they wanted.)  All these factors demonstrate why Chinese food in Los Angeles is dominant.

Of course, so far you only have my word and conclusions as to the superiority of Los Angeles Chinese food, but there are more objective indications.  Many people might assume Chinese food in San Francisco is better just due to their historic reputation.   But the San Francisco Chronicle put out a special Chinese food section which included an article on how San Francisco is now lagging behind Los Angeles in the Chinese food scene.  They quote an expert named David R. Chan as saying, ”The San Francisco Bay area is still five years behind Los Angeles when it comes to Chinese food.”  So maybe that isn’t any greater proof but the article goes on to quote two food writers who cover Chinese food in LA and SF as being in agreement.  And most importantly, there is agreement from a top San Francisco Chinese restauranteur, who in referring to the flood of Mainland China based restaurants opening in Los Angeles says that “Los Angeles is a testing ground for a lot of Chinese restauranteurs.  If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” 

Another measure is the flow of diners between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  As I recounted, decades ago, the better Chinese food was in San Francisco and we Angelinos would flock to San Francisco for that better food.  Now that flow has reversed.  Recently we were on a tour group and met some Chinese from San Francisco who said they regularly drove down to the San Gabriel Valley because the Chinese food was so much better than what they got in San Francisco.  When I asked them what their favorite restaurant was, I was stunned because they mentioned a place that I and many others considered to be a run of the mill San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurant.   Likewise, if you read the food message boards, you see numerous postings from Bay Area Chinese foodies who readily admit our Chinese food is better and ask for local recommendations.  And these days one seldom hears a Chinese diner from Los Angeles say that they’re going to the Bay Area for the purpose of eating superior Chinese food there (though I have to admit my favorite Cantonese restaurants are in the Bay Area).

There may also be a few out-of-touch New Yorkers who assume their Chinese food is better than Los Angeles, but the only people holding that opinion are New Yorkers who have never eaten Chinese food in Los Angeles, or whose favorite Chinese dish is General Tso’s Chicken.  Perhaps the best commentary as to the relative quality of New York Chinese food was the New York Times feature on Chinese food that opened with the unqualified statement that the best Chinese food in America is in Southern California.  Just as compelling was a New York restaurant critic’s listing a while back of the 25 best restaurants in the United States.  Not best Chinese restaurants in the country, but the 25 best restaurants period.  There was only one Chinese restaurant on his list, Shi Hai in Alhambra (now World Seafood), which was a real head scratcher since while a decently good restaurant, Shi Hai wasn’t particularly acclaimed locally and probably wouldn’t have made anybody’s list of the top 25 Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles, let alone anybody else’s list of the best restaurants of any kind in the country.  The only explanation is that the critic probably hadn’t eaten at any of the really outstanding Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, but somebody took him to Shi Hai and it was better than anything he had eaten at in New York.  

New York Chinese food has been on the upswing with the introduction of shiny new Chinese dining venues, especially in Flushing.  But Chinese cuisine is dynamic.  Chinese love their food so much that Chinese chefs are continually coming up with even better, newer dishes.  And the first landing place in the United States for these great new dishes is Los Angeles, and it often literally takes years for them to arrive in New York.  A while back I was interviewed by a Chinese food writer in New York and he asked me what my favorite Chinese dish was.  I said "fish dumplings."  He said "What's that?"  Well, it wasn't until five years later that fish dumplings finally arrived in Flushing.

Los Angeles Chinese food has come a long way in a very short time, or at least it seems like a short time to me since I lived through the process, from a tertiary afterthought among Chinese American communities, to its consensus leadership as the best Chinese food center in America today.  As Chinese Americans spread out throughout the country today, assisted by Mainland Chinese students landing in virtually every college and university town in the US, authentic Chinese food can now be found in so many more localities than before.  However, for breadth, depth, quality, and I may add affordability, nothing beats the Chinese food here.